Crown Heights, Twenty Years After the Riots

As a fresh arrival to New York just over a year ago, I ended up in Crown Heights one late August afternoon looking for a new apartment. Climbing the stairs out of a subway station that dangled near the end of an express line, I stopped at the top and surveyed my surroundings. The ride over had been an indicator of my new neighborhood: most of the white passengers had exited at earlier stops until it was only me and other black passengers of varied African, Caribbean, and American descent. The exception was a couple of Hasidic Jews, leaning on poles or sitting together on orange and yellow subway seats, talking and laughing in a world of their own. I exited onto the Crown Heights thoroughfare of Nostrand Avenue, where I would end up living for many months, and walked past blacks and Jews strolling on the same sidewalks and buying vegetables at the same markets. In the years since the riots of 1991, I wondered how much had changed. Today, as the neighborhood marks the twentieth anniversary of the riots, residents are wondering, too.

The three-day riots had been ignited by the accidental death of a Gavin Cato, a seven-year-old black boy who was run over by a Hasidic Jewish driver. Rumors that the death was deliberate and the driver was drunk (both untrue), along with the fact that a Hatzolah ambulance crew did not bring Cato to the hospital before a city ambulance could (there were different accounts of why), exacerbated the existing tension between blacks and Jews. (Black residents had lost a heated political redistricting fight that they believed gave the Jewish community better law-enforcement protection, and many felt they suffered inferior treatment by the police and when they sought housing.) In his eulogy at Cato’s funeral service, Reverend Al Sharpton referred to Jews as “diamond dealers” and lamented the “apartheid” nature of the private Hasidic ambulances. In the violent protests that ensued, teen-agers specifically targeted Jews with violence, and a group of young black men murdered Yankel Rosenbaum, a twenty-nine year old student from Australia. (Malcolm Gladwell wrote about the activism of Rosenbaum’s brother after the riots.)

Crown Heights leaders, activists, and students planned together a celebration of the neighborhood that took place last night, the final gathering in a month-long series of block parties and educational programs. The black and Jewish residents of Crown Heights “have spent a lot of time listening to each other,” Rabbi Bob Kaplan of the Jewish Community Relations Council told The Jewish Week, in a change from earlier days. (Read David Remnick on the Crown Heights of 1991.) Members of local grassroots organizations say they have seen an improvement in relations—pleasant working environments and more eye contact and greetings on the streets.

Still, hurt feelings linger. A panel reflecting on the riots scheduled to take place this Sunday at the Hampton Synagogue was abruptly postponed Thursday over outrage that Sharpton was slated to speak. Rosenbaum’s family had expressed anger at the synagogue’s inclusion of Sharpton, though he has now pulled out.

The Crown Heights riots, though they lasted only a few days, became a cultural touchstone in American culture. When The New Yorker ran a cover of a black woman kissing a Hasidic Jewish man two years later, the resulting controversy illustrated that the upheaval, and what it showed about ethnic tensions, had yet to fade in the country’s memory. Rudolph Giuliani, a former prosecutor, used the violence as a campaign issue in 1993 against the incumbent David Dinkins, who was accused of black nationalism and of letting the rioters roam unrestrained. (Giuliani called the riots a “pogrom.”) He won voters by saying that the city had failed its Jews, eight years before the rest of America would become familiar with him as a leader after September 11th. He was still on the job during the September 11th attacks.

The sentiment of distrust has not yet entirely dissipated, on either side. “They don’t speak to us,” Carol Morton, a sixty-seven-year-old black art merchant, told a reporter. “I don’t see no change. They stick together. They don’t care about us.”

“We can’t break bread with them,” Roz Malamud, a sixty-seven-year-old Jewish woman who also lives in Crown Heights, told the same reporter. “We can’t learn from them. We are equal, but separate.”

Separate, maybe, but neighbors. Twenty years ago, for three bloody days, Crown Heights was the scene of mob attacks, thefts, confusion, and fear. But the Crown Heights that I know is one that remembers its past, but doesn’t dwell on it. In places like Basil Pizza and Wine Bar, just blocks north of my old apartment and which has famously fused a mixed black and Jewish staff and clientele, the atmosphere is convivial. On school days, kids horse around outside of both the public school and the neighboring yeshiva on wide, calm streets. In a sense, what was once, at one moment in New York’s history, very important to blacks and Jews—their strained relationship—has simply become less of an issue. Whatever the distance between them, the two communities can celebrate that their lives are led peacefully, in a shared urban space.

Illustration by Tim Bower.

Alexis Okeowo is a contributing writer for The New Yorker. She is working on a book about people standing up to extremism in Africa.